Let The Games Begin.

David Frum is talking great sense and is well aware that the Republicans got more than a bloody nose the other night, they no longer have a message that any of us can understand never mind relate to. They talk of small government whilst expanding it, they talk of fiscal conservatism whilst running up record deficits, in short the only thing they have left are the social issues which excite their base and repel the rest of us.

So he has come up with a radical - and I think healthy - plan:

College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats – but that their values are under threat from Republicans. And there are more and more of these college-educated Americans all the time.

So the question for the GOP is: Will it pursue them? To do so will involve painful change, on issues ranging from the environment to abortion. And it will involve potentially even more painful changes of style and tone: toward a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy, and less polarizing on social issues. That’s a future that leaves little room for Sarah Palin – but the only hope for a Republican recovery.

I've said it before but the moment of this election which will always stay in my mind was Palin telling Katie Couric that she would force a fifteen year old girl raped by her father to have the baby. I simply couldn't get my brain around how, in the year 2008, someone could say that publicly and not realise how insane they sounded. How they could be so immersed in their own self righteousness that they did not realise how the majority of people would recoil from someone who said that?

Balloon Juice link to John Henke who notes:

The problem is a movement that plays small-ball and cedes responsibility for infrastructure to business interests, leadership that rewards those who make friends rather than waves, an entrenched Party and Movement support system that mostly supports itself, an echo chamber that has rotted our intellect, a grassroots that is ill-equipped to shape the Republican Party, and a Republican Party that has replaced strategy with tactics, substance with marketing. These problems can be fixed, but the fix is not cosmetic. The rot is deep.

They really have been left with just the Malkins of this world and that's a recipe for disaster because Malkin and her ilk see Palin as their next leader.

Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin's critics as "cocktail party conservatives" who "give aid and comfort to the enemy".

He told The Sunday Telegraph: "There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?"

This is why I have been saying that I see this as the death of the Republican party in it's present form. They stand for nothing, they are simply gasbags preaching their reactionary nonsense to other gasbags.

Most sensible Republicans announced their defection to Obama realising that no-one is going to vote for a party that can run an entire campaign without ever uttering a word about policy. No-one, in the 21st century, is going to elect a ticket where the VP wants to force rape victims to bear their own father's child.

That's simply insane. And yet Palin, according to Nuzzo, will now be the litmus test.

As Balloon Juice put it, the circular firing squad is now in position. Let the games begin.

Tags: Republicans, Palin, firing squad, repercussions, US election 2008